As a human, Jesus's first home was the safety of Mary's womb.
Our world was no home for God, the God who longs to dwell with people.
We all long for a safe home, but no home is safe if God is not there.
God with us. He is our peace.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Here's what I'm reading lately.
Cheaper by the Dozen, 1948 - for fun
Alice's Adventures under Ground, a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's 1864 manuscript
Rose from Brier by Amy Carmichael, 1933
The Lewis Carroll facsimile is fascinating. Here are two sample pages.
A hand-written, author-illustrated book is interesting to me.
The Amy Carmichael book, as you'd expect, is deep and cuts straight to the heart. This book is a selection of letters she wrote, while suffering severe physical pain, to those who were also suffering illness. Her point is that the words written while you are IN your pain (not afterward, having been delivered from it) are much more meaningful to other sufferers.
She says the "ignorant stock phrases of the well to the ill" are damaging to one's faith and give a skewed view of God. "So, how can they, the unwounded, know anything of the matter?"
"Pain and helplessness are not rest," she says, in response to a friend who wrote to her about her "enforced rest" after a painful accident and broken ankle/morphine/surgery. "Pain and helplessness are not rest, and never can be; nor is the weakness that follows acute pain, nor the tiredness that is so tired of being tired that it is poles apart from rest. [God] knows that rest is found in that sense of well-being one has after a gallop on horseback, or a plunge in a forest pool ... in physical and in mental fitness, in power to do." (20)
So true. Age also distances one from rest, I'm finding. I'm only beginning this little book, but it's a gem.
7 comments:
You're finding time to read even in this "busy" time of the year. Good for you.
What good points she makes about rest. It's just as she says about being on one's sickbed or even walking around on limited duty when ill, in pain, or exhausted. It's different sort of trial that doesn't bring with it a quiet or restful spirit, and it's harder to really pray, too, though I have heard from more holy people, that if the opportunity is used to persevere in prayer anyway, the rewards are worth the suffering.
You are right. Alice's Adventures Underground looks soooo interesting. I have never seen a book like that.
Just a little bit, GM.
That is the impression I also get from elderly saints, Gretchen. They become warriors in prayer when other things are stripped away, and they're often in pain or bed-ridden while learning that discipline.
Isn't it cool? I'm glad to get a chance to see what the book looked like to him, at the very beginning.
That's an interesting thought on the words of the well to the sick- we shouldn't just say things to say something but show silent caring or love.
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